Speaking to NBC Washington in 2020, an undocumented worker named Kilmar Abrego Garcia described his worst fear after an arrest led to him being labeled a gang member.
“All my hopes were gone,” he told News4 through an interpreter. “I only imagined being deported to El Salvador, and a lot of things could happen to me because they were labeling me as a gang member.”
Stream NBC4 newscasts for free right here, right now.
WATCH HEREFive years later, Abrego Garcia – whose image of being frog-marched in a Salvadoran prison has been broadcast around the world – has become a central figure in a clash between President Trump’s administration and the courts over immigration law.
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia believe his troubles stem, in part, from that arrest and a now-defunct database of suspected gang members used by police. In 2020, NBC Washington and Telemundo 44 published an investigation raising questions about the accuracy and fairness of the database, called GangNET.
We have the news you need to know to start your day. Sign up for the First & 4Most morning newsletter — delivered to your inbox daily.
SIGN UP The database held the names of more than 7,000 suspected gang members in a bid to help police combat crime, but critics and civil rights advocates say it robbed those people of due process, disproportionately impacted people of color and wrongfully ensnared the innocent.
“I can only theorize that allegation from 2019, which was never found to be substantiated at all … has still followed him to this present day,” Lucia Curiel told NBC4 in March.
She represented Abrego Garcia in immigration proceedings after he was arrested outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., in 2019.
Local
Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia local news, events and information
It was during that court process they learned Abrego Garcia’s name had been added to GangNET, which was run through a federal grant program called the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA).
Since News4 and Telemundo 44’s reporting, some police agencies stopped using the database, and it is now decommissioned. But Abrego Garcia’s forced removal raises questions about whether its information is still impacting lives.
How the GangNET database worked and why people may not have known their info was added
The program’s former director, Tom Carr, described in 2020 how law enforcement used GangNET.
“If they are investigating for criminal activity, they are going to check the database to see whether the people they believe are suspected in the activity are involved in gangs and, if so, who they associate with and, if so, where they've been seen,” Carr said.
He acknowledged those whose names were put into the database may not have known.
“We don't tell people when they are under investigation. That would be counterproductive,” Carr said.
Individuals could be placed in the GangNET database if they met certain criteria, such as whether they or someone else said they were in a gang, if they used gang signs or wore its colors, if they associated with gang members, or if they had gang tattoos.
The Prince George’s County Police Department was among those that used a gang field interview sheet to record incidents. In 2020, the police department told News4 it’s up to HIDTA to make “the determination to place an individual into the database based on several criteria.”
News4 reviewed the interview sheet connected to Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest outside a big box store, where he was looking for work. It states he was accused because he was with other men who were believed to be members of the MS-13 gang, wore clothing officers said was “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture” and due to the word of a “reliable confidential source.”
Abrego Garcia did not face charges, and his attorneys have denied his involvement in any gang.
“This whole process is a way to get around the protections of the criminal justice system, at least with regards to undocumented immigrants,” Curiel said of GangNET in 2020.
Former gang unit officer described a GangNET quota
Carr, the former Washington/Baltimore HIDTA director, said in 2020 the database was an investigative tool and its data was not enough to obtain a warrant, convict or deport anyone. News4 asked if it was possible for innocent people to be placed in the database.
“It could happen. The likelihood is greatly diminished by the fact that we check the database itself to make sure these individuals do meet the criteria, and we perform audits to make sure,” he said then.
But a former Prince George’s County police officer who worked in the gang unit said officers had a quota for adding new names to the database – an accusation the police department denied.
“People were just doing that for a stat, because that's how we were evaluated in the gang unit,” said the ex-officer, who asked News4 not to reveal his identity for fear of retaliation, in 2020.
“They stop somebody that they think it was, but then when you look at it or you look at the totality of the picture, he wasn't,” he continued. “He was just maybe in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”
A lawsuit and discontinued use of GangNET in some areas
Shortly after News4’s report aired in December 2020, a Virginia police taskforce that included Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William counties, among others, said it would no longer use GangNET. That decision came amid complaints from civil rights advocates about GangNET, but reportedly also stemmed from decreased use of the tool.
Then, in 2024, the nonprofit Chicago Justice Project filed a civil lawsuit against the Prince George’s County Police Department, citing News4’s GangNET investigation. The suit accused the department of “illegal mass surveillance of minority residents” and failing to provide records detailing what it had provided to the database.
The CJP and police department later settled the case, they told News4.
According to a Prince George’s County police spokesman, the department “stopped entering into GangNET in 2022 due to personnel changes, alternative investigative approaches and fewer law enforcement agencies were utilizing the database making it less valuable.”
Jeff Beeson, the new executive director for Washington/Baltimore HIDTA, told News4 GangNET was decommissioned earlier this year because of “decreased usage and cost.” He said the information in it was purged.
Beeson said he couldn’t speak to the effectiveness of GangNET when it was in use, but he stands by the agency’s mission to disrupt drug trafficking. He said information-sharing was a component of that work.
Is ICE still using GangNET data?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Maryland made the arrest that led to Abrego Garcia’s forced removal to El Salvador, despite having protected status intended to prevent him from being sent there.
The News4 asked if it uses GangNET data to make arrests. The agency did not directly answer the question but said in a statement, “ICE is leveraging AI-driven data analytics, intelligence sharing, and biometric tracking to ensure high-priority criminal aliens are swiftly identified and removed.”
Still, Abrego Garcia’s attorney believes his deportation is connected to being labeled a gang member – an accusation the White House and the Department of Homeland Security have repeated in defending his removal from Maryland.
Abrego Garcia declared his innocence in a conversation with News4 in 2020 and continues to today from a Salvadoran prison.
“I have no criminal record in my country or in the United States,” he said in 2020.
Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper.
Sign up for our free deep-dive newsletter, The 4Front, to get standout News4 stories sent right to your inbox. Subscribe here.
